SOPHIA: TO MAKE WAR ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE.
WAR WAS THE FORCE WE WERE, BUT IT'S ALL OVER NOW.

Abstract: Homo evolved by fighting a 10 million year war against himself. But however smart that was, and however bloody men are born to be, it is clear that technology is getting too powerful to keep on indulging in war of man against man, the greatest passion known so far. It is time for a new war, not against bodies, but against those of our ways which have no future.

Introduction: War may have been the most important factor in the evolution of the genus Homo. This sobering possibility extends to love itself, but the situation is changing. Our techniques are turning us into Gods. If we do not change our psychobiology, we will be Gods of Evil. We have to reorganize civilization, its values, methods, and emotions, so that old sociobiological habits such as war and the associated fascism become "option(s) whose time has passed " (Nixon). A case in point is World War One which occurred because Germany was fascist and three madmen (an American, a Prussian, and the "Caesar") played with hundreds of millions of people as if they were tumbling dice. There should be nothing so sacred about a few men that they decide the fate of mankind. Fascism attacked the democracies, August 1, 1914, under the pretext that France and Russia could be viewed as possible future threats. Fascists always act according to this paranoid psychology. Chimpanzees do the exact same thing when they obsess about exterminating the neighbors. Rome used the same paranoid logics again and again, as its republic became imperial. Any imaginable possible future threat to Rome served as a pretext for Roman aggression. Rome annihilated Carthage, crushed and enslaved Greek democracy, and ravaged Gaul under the pretext that they could be viewed as possible future threats. War became the Roman way of life; the accompanying fascism caused the collapse of the republic, a religious dictatorship, and the Dark Ages. The American "neoconservatives", far from being new, also advocate the sociobiological trait of SUSPICION JUSTIFYING EXTERMINATION. They plaster words on ape-men's rage. Starting with the chimps, hominid psychobiology has evolved an ever more bellicose psyche, culminating with the Bush administration's command of reality itself: "WE ARE AN EMPIRE NOW, AND WHEN WE ACT, WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY ". Deep down the apes are so bloody, that no passion gets them as high as the frenzy of the kill. For intelligence to survive, this inheritance will have to be fully understood, and domesticated, with all its ramifications, until physical conflict is not an option anymore. That is the only war on terror which really matters. Against the Gods, the Gods themselves contend in vain.

WAR HAS BECOME OBSOLETE:

"War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them..." (Richard Nixon, 1983).
We are between the jaws of science and war. Only war can be eliminated. But war goes to the heart of what it means to be human. The 1914-45 world war shows how easily military might can get out of control:

THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE OF WORLD WAR ONE: THE DEUTSCHES REICH WAS A FASCIST STATE.

No European PEOPLE had interest to fight WW1. Europe was on a path of accelerating prosperity. The reason the war occurred nevertheless was that, whereas democracies are vast statistical ensembles with average moods, it is not so in countries commanded by a few individuals. A republic such as France was mostly controlled by the people, whereas Germany was controlled by just one man, the Kaiser (= Caesar). The mood of a republic of 40 million such as France in 1914 does not jump up and down, whereas one individual's mood will do so. As it turned out, the Kaiser was mercurial, a congenital condition affecting his mood, and was manipulated by another man, General Molkte. Germany was ordered around by a few men who had not been elected, it was a FASCIST state. There is a recent cover-up of this fact. The reason for the cover-up is that the justifications and procedures which caused WW1 were immediately recycled, causing Nazism, and now adventures such as the invasion of Iraq. It is easier to organize vast human ensembles the fascist way, and many of the powerful in the West were able to make the best of fascism, even after it became apparent history.

Fascism's justification is terror and war. Without them, fascism has no reason to be, and wilts back to democracy. That is why fascism eternally encourages new conflicts (like invading Iraq when one is attacked by Afghanistan-Pakistan). Germany under Prussian ownership had been militarized, i.e., fascisized. It was time to attack something to keep fascism healthy. The great enemy of Prussian fascism was republican, democratic France. France had lost a big chunk of her most industrialized regions (Alsace and coal rich Lorraine) in the first bloody round against the Prussians in 1870-71. Eliminating the French republic became more urgent to the fascists as Russia reformed, became a parliamentary democracy, and started to get financial help from France. Prussian fascism felt surrounded: it feared that German politicians wanted democracy, rather than just being content with the best (and only) universal health care in the world, a literacy rate which was about 100%, and a rich, expanding economy.

AMERICAN ENCOURAGEMENT TO PRUSSIAN MADNESS AS THE DECISIVE FACTOR IN THE FASCIST ATTACK OF AUGUST 1, 1914:

The Kaiser agreed in a secret conference with his top military aides to attack the French republic within 18 months (Dec. 1912). Their idea was preventive war against what they viewed as the irresistible rise of French and Russian power. A few guys had a paranoid vision of the universe, but they commanded Germany. Still the Kaiser did not really want a world war, he was not that bloodthirsty. The Kaiser was hesitating, he could not make up his mind. Julius Caesar had attacked Gaul under the pretext of the attempted trek of the Helvetia across Gaul (to go live with their relatives). Julius had construed that as a possible future threat against Rome, and attacked Gaul (Caesar had Alexander envy). The Kaiser found no such pretext, and his motivation was quivering.

The right arm of American President Wilson, US "Colonel" House, came to Europe in an official visit. HOUSE'S PURPOSE WAS WORLD WAR. House reveals in his reports to the US president that he was anxious that "those two" (Germany and Britain) NOT settle their differences, lest they became "too close", which was "not in our interest". The American policy of playing the Europeans against each other had started, following the old "divide and conquer" trick of the Roman imperialists. It was to be an ocean of blood.

The Kaiser viewed himself as the preferred grand son of Queen Victoria, perhaps to compensate for his congenital malformation. On May 1, 1914, Colonel House told the Kaiser that an arrangement was possible with Britain, if the Germans would accept a marginal British naval supremacy. That exact same arrangement was proposed again to Hitler in 1935, allowing Hitler to violate the Versailles treaty under Anglo-American protection, thereby preventing a timely attack of the French republic on the fascist Third Reich (indeed, if WW1 proved so very profitable to some Anglo-Americans, why not try it a second time?).

House made an irresistible offer, a vision of glory, to the vainglorious Kaiser: the American presidential envoy proposed to the Kaiser a joint world government of the USA, Great Britain and Germany. The "SUBHUMAN" French were to be explicitly excluded, a point the racist Kaiser found most exciting. He longed to get rid of the French. At this point the Kaiser probably felt fully encouraged to do to the tribe of French chimpanzees next door what tribes of chimpanzees have been selected to do over at least 10 million years: go exterminate them. And the French chimpanzees understood this feeling well, so, after they got attacked, they fought like crazy.

On August 1, 1914, three months after the inspiring visit of the American envoy, the German Reich attacked three democracies, Russia, France, and Luxembourg, and delivered an ultimatum to a fourth one, Belgium (to let through a two million men German army effective immediately). Nobody expected this. The surprise was so great that the French government, all of it, was away on the traditional summer vacation. An undersecretary in Paris gave the first orders of general mobilization. The British would have been amazed if they had been told, early in the last week of July that, a week later, Britain would be in a state of war with Germany. Britain had no army. Neither the British citizens, nor the British government, saw WW1 coming. Nobody expected a world war in 1914, because nobody had listened in on the House-Kaiser conversation. An assassination of Austrians, by an Austrian, in Austrian territory, was brandished later on as the cause of the war. The real truth IS much too scary: the German military had started a premeditated world war of choice, with US ENCOURAGEMENT. Because the true cause of WW1 was not exposed, the same crowd of behind the scenes manipulators, and their children, relatives or friends, on both sides of the Atlantic, renewed the same game with Hitler and established a world empire, from which they mightily profited (the American empire, the one which creates its own reality).

CRIMINAL GULLIBILITY MADE POSSIBLE THE PRUSSIAN (WORLD) WAR OF CHOICE; A TROUBLING COMPARISON WITH SOME AMERICANS' WILLINGNESS TO BELIEVE WHATEVER THE LEADERS SAY:

Germans were viewed as unpatriotic if they did not believe what they were told to believe by their leaders. This was the key part of the fascist imprinting, the core of the new German culture. The Germans had been indoctrinated to believe their leaders, come what may. It was a moral duty to believe the Kaiser, a war emperor, a personage full of exhibitionistic military bluster, fond of military garb. The same adoration was extended to Hitler in an even more desperate way.

The Kaiser's government claimed, in the last week of July, as it launched German general mobilization, that it feared an eminent Russian attack (hey, why not?). OK, granted, it was more plausible than an Iraqi attack. The Germans were told that the very existence of the Russian threat proved that the French were behind it (hey, who else?). So France had to be struck first. Most Germans swallowed these absurdities with military discipline. Many Americans, a century later, proved even more gullible.

Bush, the self described US "war-president" talked about the possibility of an Iraqi made mushroom cloud over America. The rest of the planet listened to this in disbelief, knowing full well that Iraq could not make a nuclear device, because Iraq never had access to any nuclear fission fuel (thanks to an ancient Israeli raid). Nevertheless many in America believed the "war president". Bush also implied obsessively that Al Qaeda worked for the Iraqis, although evidence was to the opposite. The rest of the planet knew that religious Al Qaeda and the secular Iraqi "socialists" hated each other. Powell, the US secretary of state, came to the UN, and exhibited aluminum tubes as proof that Iraq was building nuclear devices (The Iraqi devil should be able to fission aluminum!), and he spoke of trucks, to prove Iraq was making biological weapons (as if bio labs were traveling zoos!). The US government also suggested that Iraq would attack the USA with small robotic planes. Groupthink America believed all of it. By then American public opinion was enraged against Iraq (and the French, because they think). The further from cosmopolitan cultural centers Americans were, the lower their IQ, the more they believed their government had created a reality they loved to hate, and they went all around repeating like donkeys who just learned to talk, the absurdities their leaders taught them.

WE NOW KNOW THAT TOO MUCH MILITARIZATION MAKES SOME CULTURES CRIMINAL:

In July 1914, a few fascists were able to order Germany to attack the world, by feeding lies to what one should call a CRIMINALLY GULLIBLE CULTURE. The fascist instinct is to follow the leader, and believe whatever he says, or does, so once fascism is in play, so is criminal gullibility, and unthinking behavior, they all go together. It became difficult, though, to disguise, even to the gullible Germans, the fact that WW1 was just a naked Prussian aggression, and soon this affected the morale of the German troops and population. Hitler deplored this. More reasons to fight the war should have been invented, he wrote, and the Franco-British won the war mostly with their crafty propaganda, which bolstered Franco-British morale, and turned the fierce Teutonic warriors to mush. Hitler may have failed to appreciate that many Germans wanted to live in democracy too, and that they tired of fighting what they wanted deep down inside. The same collapse of German fascist morale happened in 1945, when even some SS refused to obey orders; hurt in his feelings, an enraged Hitler stripped of his own name the SS division which was bearing it.

In August 1914, millions of soldiers boarded the trains to go to war in a state of exaltation. The attack blossomed right away into something else, an enthusiastic sociobiological mass phenomenon, an exotic, demonic mass neurology. Where does this passion for war, this creation of a new reality in the service of war come from? Well, we have to go back at least 10 million years.

WAR AS SIMIAN POPULATION CONTROL:

Chimpanzees fight wars of extermination. Somehow chimp psychobiology makes them view other tribes of chimps as something to eradicate. It is obvious why such a sociobiological trait should have evolved. When there are too many of a prey species, such as hare, or deer, or koalas, the predators multiply until they bring the numbers of prey way down (and then the predators starve in turn, and the cycle starts again, in a Nietzsche-Poincare' eternal return of the same). Preying on prey species is easy. But preying on apes is difficult and dangerous. Chimpanzees are powerful, intelligent, help each other in combat; and are capable of the most profound insanity rather than accepting to become food. Whereas all continents evolved predators to deal with prey, the brainy apes evolved their behaviors faster than any predator could. Apes outsmarted large land predators in combat. Predators could not control the apes' population. Now if chimpanzees were left to multiply like koalas, they would starve, become victim of a pandemic, and the species would die off, except perhaps for a few very nasty survivors. This made chimpanzees view chimpanzees as a problem, all the more since only chimpanzees can seriously cull chimpanzees. Surviving chimpanzees were evolutionary selected not just as the fittest, but as those most apt to go kill other chimpanzees before they became a problem. Chimpanzees do not just make war, their psychobiology makes WAR PREVENTIVELY. Chimps have been observed to exterminate other groups of chimps in patient multiyear wars, even if they were relatives. Our common ancestors with chimpanzees assuredly behaved very similarly to today's chimps, ten million years ago. War was in us, right from the start. The situation which led to war between chimps became more pronounced in hominids.

THOSE CLEVER APE-MEN FOUND THAT ANIMALS WERE THE FOOD FOR THOUGHT PAR EXCELLENCE:

Chimpanzees also hunt. Succulent young baboons are clever, chimpanzees gang up to eat them. Chimpanzee tribes can eat mostly meat. Why is an animal made to eat fruit so obsessed with flesh? Chimpanzees have a huge gut to digest all the plants they need. But it is obvious, even to chimps, that animal protein is the richest source of nutrients and energy. The brain is an energy guzzler: in a Homo Sapiens at rest, it uses up to 25% of the energy. Aside from this, chimpanzees have been selected to be and look fierce, so killing is both education and celebration.

Some chimpanzees went all the way, and evolved into professional meat eaters, the hominids. That allowed them to simultaneously reduce the size of the gut (allowing to walk and hunt more efficiently), live wherever meat could be found, augment the supply of energy to the brain, and learn to project shock and awe. Hominids became two legged, arms bearing lions (complete with mane). The war hominids, ancestors to the war president, became the most successful animals on earth. The rougher they played, the more they got reelected. At some point there were 14 species and two genera of hominids, in East Africa alone. The more carnivorous genus Homo split from the powerful plant munching Australopithecines. The war was frantic: shortly before their demise, Australopithecines' brains were growing even faster than Homo's brains, probably trying to catch up. Mayhem lasted for millions of years. The fiercest, most clever ones came out on top, and here we are, very satisfied with ourselves. It's as simple as that. A midget Homo species of humans lived on the island of Flores until historical times, because dangerous, deadly, morally exterminationist Homo Sapiens arrived there only very recently. Eating small people was too funny to resist, for Mr. and Ms. Sapiens. Evolution was never a recycling of the same, but now the crown of creation, Homo, consciously tinkered with evolution. Homo made the entire planet into a garden, an artificial world where war was the key to survival into the next season. WAR BECAME THE MASTER OF CREATION. Even the higher and more noble emotions came under the spell of war:

TO MAKE WAR, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE:

Hominids are harder to kill than chimpanzees, so, to kill men, men needed a lot of help. Homo was way more deadly than a chimpanzee, but the paradox is that love was necessary for war. To kill a fiercer enemy, men had to love their fellow men much more, because only disciplined bands of brothers could kill human prey. EVOLUTION BECAME A LOVEFEST, BECAUSE IT WAS A WARFEST. With the great hatred for the guys on the other side of the hill came great comradeship and brotherhood and love for the fellow soldiers in the exciting extermination campaigns. No wonder so many people are crazy.
Now why is it that hominids get more excited by war than anything else? An obvious evolutionary answer is that those who love war best fight it better, so survive better. Inside minds, the evolutionary propensity to war got enacted by the physiology of pleasure.

What does it mean, to love? It means some very strong emotions, i.e., powerful (neuro)chemistry. Because war is the master, though, it uses even more powerful chemistry, a lot of which is in common with the chemistry of love, but at higher doses, and that is why human beings feel so much in love with war. War creates emotions so great, they are second to none, and addictive. Neither thirst, hunger, nor sex can compare to the struggle of life with death. During the Crusades, although the losses of the Franks were enormous, they kept at it nonchalantly, excited as they were by the cosmic grandeur of it all.

Evolution of most of human psychobiology became WAR DRIVEN. Not content with perverting love itself, evolution reinforced the fascist instinct, to serve war better. That instinct ("be as the Leader commands!"), which makes groups of baboons so strong, was in danger of being overwhelmed by the power of human intelligence. Big human brains tend to get distracted, and forget the importance of war, and how to fight it. An independent capability to discern irrelevant reality was a drawback in combat. The capacity to independently discern reality had to disappear when given orders in combat. When men each create their own discernible reality, democracy reigns. When only a few command a reality their followers do not discern, fascism reigns.

WAR CREATES A DIFFERENT REALITY AND PROVIDES RELIEF TO THE HUMAN CONDITION BY MAKING MEN INTO GODS:

Power comes by studying reality, and finding how to tweak it by carefully discerning among its elements. This is what intelligence does, and why it evolved. Facing combat and possible extermination, though, the tribe has to strike as if it were one superorganism, i.e., as if it were of just one mind, that of the Leader. This is what fascism is for, and it is best in the savannah, fighting lions. The prosperous, hyperpowerful German tribe was not facing mortal combat in July 1914, so the fascists, eager to justify their existence, created one. The war created a flood of neurohormones and changed the way Germans were perceiving reality, from one they could themselves discern to one created for them by the Leader. Using war to create a reality necessary to who is in command (= imperare) is so obvious that it is consciously used by the US administration:

In the New York Times Magazine (Oct. 2004), the writer Ron Suskind told of a meeting he'd had with a senior adviser to US president Bush. According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'." The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. WE ARE AN EMPIRE NOW, AND WHEN WE ACT WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY."

Prewar people live in a reality which is passť. It was discernible reality. The White House doesn't recognize that kind of reality. The reality the US empire wants to impose on the world is not discernible anymore. Why not discernible? Because that reality is created by the empire in which "we create our own reality ". That is how fascism works: a few Leaders create the reality they want, an imperial reality which is not discernible, because no one else is inside their heads to discern what is going on there.

War makes men into Gods, because war makes them free to give death, and each of them feel like Jupiter, deciding who will live, and who will die. Even better: by making life into something which can be taken away, so taken lightly, war makes death into a consumer good. Man, the Good Lord, gives life, and takes life. WAR DOES NOT JUST CAUSE DEATH, IT HUMANIZES IT BY FLOUTING IT. War makes death into something acceptable. Kill the other one, and here is dinner, or a few medals. Prehistoric war made man into the main course, modern war makes death not just convenient, but ridiculous. Kill 100,000 Iraqi civilians, weep for the 1,100 US soldiers who died, killing them, and call that an all-American value.

EXAMPLES OF MILITARY MIGHT COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL:

WW1 is an example of military might going to war all by itself. To make sure the unpredictable Kaiser would not interfere, Molkte sent him away on vacation, and lied to him to make sure he went (Molkte told Wilhem it should not look as if the Kaiser had anything to do with Austria going to war with Serbia; the Kaiser found that "childish", but he went, not knowing that Molkte was to start a world war behind his back); when Germany attacked the democracies, Austria had still not declared war to Serbia, and would not for days (in spite of Germany urging for it to do so, to be able to claim that the war was about alliances irresistibly coming into play). When Austria finally attacked, Serbia crushed Austria.
Controlling the military is difficult. Why? Precisely because the military is the instrument of control. Who controls the controller? Stalin, Hitler and Mao had to kill many of their own military to stay on top.

200,000 Mongol warriors conquered all between Austria and Japan, and considered turning China in a Mongol friendly steppe, after finishing off the natives. The Spanish Conquistadores, a few incredibly determined, resourceful and courageous, not to say completely crazy men, acting without any orders, destroyed the three imperial civilizations of the Americas in a few years.

Civilizations also collapse when a warrior aristocracy gets completely out of control. This is what happened to Athens and Rome. Hubris, imperialism, and human rights abuses led to a backlash which destroyed Athens. Roman war and fascism slowly increased to the point fighting broke all over the imperial republic. Four centuries later the empire degenerated into a "universal" (=Catholic) dictatorship (circa 380 CE), which forbid choosing one's own reality.

Empires are nearly by definition military aristocracies, except the British and French empires, which had democracies at their cores (so they did not last long; democracy is more inventive, in a science driven competition, it was more advantageous than empire). Empires have been the most frequent type of government, as soon as agricultural technology allowed to rise armies. Democracy, which is natural in small groups of humans when not at war (i.e., in a non fascist state), is a rarity. Democracies keep on reappearing, though: although smaller, they encourage intelligence, hence high tech, hence they win wars, until they turn in the next empire (when the "neoconservatives" take power).

When (the dictator) Napoleon heard that (US president) Washington was planning to retire, he said he would be the "greatest man alive " if he did so. By retiring, Washington made the American (rich white man) democracy possible. But in truth George did not have much of a choice. Differently from France, where a huge popular army had been born in defense against the aristocratic powers of Europe (plus misguided Britain), the US army was actually a small citizen militia, so it dissolved itself as soon as the revolution had been won. One cannot be an imperator without anything to order around, Washington had to go home. By contrast, General Bonaparte found himself at the head of the (now professional) army of the world's military superpower, so he could do what he stupidly did, proclaiming himself imperator of the French. The lesson here is that the military can take control if and only if it is huge. The 18C French enlightenment had not foreseen the possibility of a French Caesar, and what a big problem he could become (Napoleon, who did not mean as bad as that, killed at least 10% of the French male population, and a few more million Europeans besides). After the US secession war (6% of the US population killed), the USA, disgusted, basically canceled the US Army (which explains in part House's concentration on manipulating the Kaiser's mind).

Japan is an excellent example of the militaryindustrial complex taking hold of an entire country, and then ordering it to conquer Asia. War conquers all. The emperor could only submit. When Japan was being destroyed, the emperor finally ordered to cease fighting, but some of the enraged generals tried to stage a coup, never mind the atomic bombings.

FROM WAR, TO EMPIRE, AND NOW THE MILITARYINDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AND MAD SCIENTISTS TAKING OVER:

Eisenhower pointed out that: "... we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and WILL PERSIST. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." One could object that empires have always existed, and that they always will, as proven by the Star War movies. This is not quite right. Empires have not always existed: technology made them possible, and even unavoidable. But what technology gave, technology can take away. Eisenhower again: "... in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite." In other words, those who know how to make the weapons may end up ruling. In Pakistan, a scientist, Mr. Khan, ran his own nuclear bomb export service business, with such clients as Lybia, Iran and North Korea.

The ascendency of mad scientists becomes even more pertinent when we realize that bigger and bigger weapons can be made by smaller groups of people. Biologists have added a few proteins from the 1918 flu to a recent virus. Such a virus, if it escaped, could kill half a billion people in a month (some say the 1918 flu killed 40 million people in 3 months, and that was without jet travel). This type of research is done in BSL3+ labs in 2004, and nobody ran in the streets, or passed security in an airport, with such an engineered virus. Yet. But something like this will happen: those engineered viruses are too easy to make. Hyperpowerful table top lasers are now feasible (2004). Laser can separate isotopes, hence make nuclear explosives. All this is coming to a basement near you pretty soon, manned by the frustrated local geek with a testosterone problem.

CONCLUSION:

How to transition to more sophisticated conflicts than just killing people, and how to learn to overrule 10 million years of our own psychobiology? Destruction of the Weapons of Mass Destruction. Extreme transparency, hence much more democracy, to establish concerted command and control. A world inspection regime for WMDs should be generalized and made to work, all the way down to individual scientists. Mass psychoanalysis to determine why some hatreds came to be, and how to remove their causes (which sometimes involve the victims themselves). Acceptance of massively different cultures, and a critical look at love itself. Cultural differences to be made the objects of a new type of bloodless wars, a bit like the attempted Americanization of the planet through Hollywood, but in reverse.

At best, absent the implementation of† these new ways, a horrendous world dictatorship, accompanied by the extermination of science, and free thinking, will come to reign (as in Rome). There will be no happy middle.

Patrice Ayme', Nov. 2004

P/S: MARS, NOT MARX:

A purported explanation for war, popular among some European intellectuals, is the struggle of the haves versus the have-nots. There is little ethological support for this scheme. Social mammals and primates readily organize hierarchies and class struggles. But the hierarchy inside a group has little to do with WAR, in which, by definition, ANOTHER group is assaulted. Hyenas and lions do not fight because they belong to different socioeconomic classes; nor did the Mongols, the Arabs, or the Aztecs have a class problem. In fact, classes tend to collaborate, because the upper classes have all the weapons (being richer), including better schooling, and master mentality. The Mongols had advanced weapons (composite bows), advanced military methods (Blitzkrieg), empires to invade, trade to establish, affronts to avenge, and no class. The Arabs also had (exhausted) empires to invade, and old religions to waste. The Aztecs had a protein problem. India, which was long stratified in different (raciallo-economic) castes, saw little class struggle, but huge wars. Marxists interpret such wars as distractions visited on the people by the upper classes. This does not resist careful examination (e.g., WW1 was not an international capitalist plot, but a fascist military plot); nor does it explain why the masses find war so alluring that they forget their class oppression all of a sudden, as if, after all, Marx had little to say which interested them.